An increasing market for online courses (Allen and Seaman 2007) has created a need for online laboratory experience, and Second Life, a multiuser virtual environment (MUVE) developed by Linden Lab, offers a new dimension for science education. Virtual environments can be visited as “field sites” for face-to-face or online courses, developed for stand-alone courses given entirely within the virt...

While some students are engaging with online 3D virtual environments as creative social spaces, Virtual environments such as Second Life also provide opportunities to facilitate arts education in a flexible, connected and creative medium. Using a Second Life environment developed for Griffith University this study explored the use of a Second Life virtual environment to support the development ...

User generated virtual worlds, such as Second Life, typically lack accurate metadata for their virtual world objects. This is a significant problem for blind users who rely on textual descriptions in order to access virtual worlds using synthetic speech. In this paper, we consider the problem of automatic object labeling to improve accessibility of virtual worlds for users with disabilities. Ta...

Nowadays, new informational and communicative media, and the rate of their use by individuals have caused deep metamorphoses in the material and non-material dimensions of human lives, and individuals’ mental regulation. The use of these media, especially the Internet and virtual social networks, among Iranian teenagers has unnoticeably increased, and providing numerous facilities and opt...

A virtual mining environment aims to provide dynamic decision support to improve building life-cycle modelling and management. This paper presents the system architecture of a virtual mining environment, its interfaces and a user scenario. This virtual mining environment integrates data mining with agent-based technology, database management systems, object-based CAD systems, and 3D virtual env...